I take my camera on bike trips, so the allowable weight and size of photographic equipment is limited. Previously, I shot with 70-300mm lenses (Sigma and Tamron), but due to their low aperture, they were not well suited for portraits, shooting indoors and at dusk. On Sony I shot at 24-240 - it had the same problem, and the quality did not live up to. Tamron 70-180 solves all these problems. It is both very high quality (not inferior to the fixes I have), and fast (great for portraits and shooting in low light), and quite light + compact (you can shoot with one hand, easy to carry and carry with you without a photo backpack). Autofocus is very fast and tenacious on the A7III, worse on the A6500. Even if the lens itself is a bit short for a telephoto, you can put it on a cropped camera and get the equivalent of a 105-270 / 4 lens. The ability to shoot macro 0.5x is actively used by me - the quality is good (if the main object is in the center of the frame), the focusing distance is large enough not to obscure the object. Tamron did not actively promote this feature, but the lens deserves the Macro prefix or at least Close Focus. Of course, you have to pay for everything - the lack of an optical stabilizer is most obvious. In my test, the efficiency of the Sony A7III in-camera stabilizer with this lens is 2-3 EV. But on the Sony A6500, the stabilizer efficiency was only 1 EV according to my measurements, and this is bad - already at 1/250 s there is a noticeable risk of blurring. The lack of buttons on the lens and simple plastic are typical for amateur Tamrons, Sony for 90K look better. I think that 70-180 is worth the money, especially when the roughness with the firmware is finally solved (for the A7III you can take it now, everything seems to be fine there). There is simply no other such lens for Sony (and indeed any other full-frame system). The lens is ideal for portraits and sports. Very good for landscapes. Good for macro. However, if you don't have IBIS in your camera, then you need something else.
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